Lantern + LainaHealth: Patient-Reported Outcomes Case Study

Complication rates tell you what went wrong. Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) tell you how members really feel about their recovery.

A surgery can go perfectly by every complication metric and still leave the patient in real pain six months later. Complication rates won’t show that. PROs will.

That’s why Lantern has made PROs part of its robust approach to quality.

Over the past year, Lantern partnered with LainaHealth to collect patient-reported outcomes from before surgery through a full year after.

Thanks to LainaHealth’s simple, frictionless approach to PROs collection—a text message with no app, no portal, and no login—the program delivered an 82% response rate, roughly double to triple what conventional methods return. And because that many people responded, across every age group and procedure type, the results reflect members broadly rather than a self-selected subset of highly engaged participants.

High response rates make the data trustworthy. The data itself shows members getting better.

Here’s some of what we found:

• Knee replacement members’ function scores improved by 26 points within six months, significantly above the bar that clinicians use to call a result meaningful
• Hip replacement members’ function scores improved by 35 points within six months, with pain down 83%
• Hip and knee surgeons earned a Net Promoter Score of 90
• Bariatric surgery members lost an average of 23% of their total body weight within six months, 2 to 4 times faster than the typical timeline.

What happens next? Our network keeps getting better. Every surgeon’s outcomes get compared against published clinical benchmarks, and what we learn from that feeds straight back into how we curate the network.

For members, PROs mean their recovery is documented in their own words, not just summarized in a chart. And when someone isn’t progressing the way we’d expect, our clinical team can spot it early and step in, before it turns into a complication or a readmission.

PROs are just one data point in how we assess our Network of Excellence, but they’re critically important. Download the full report for more insights on how Lantern members recover and why these numbers matter.